


not even the burn-outs are out here anymore

by sodiumflare



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Climate Change, Gen, Nihilism, and california is burning, andy is really fucking tired, andy is really not in a good place here!, look - Freeform, or at least canon-implied violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:00:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26416048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodiumflare/pseuds/sodiumflare
Summary: Who's burning California?
Comments: 7
Kudos: 44





	not even the burn-outs are out here anymore

Andy burned a few cities back in her day. 

She's not proud of it. She's not not proud of it, either. The past is another country, as Joe says (Joe, who has been Josef, has been Yusuf, is Joey on the rare occasion that she's drunk and happy). It was - it was the expected thing. She's been in charge of something, in one way or another, for thousands of years. There was a time when she ruled jointly but now she - she doesn't. Sometimes she reads whatever they're writing about "leadership" these days, enrolls in a bullshit graduate seminar or sits through a TED Talk. No one ever writes about how so much of it is looking at where a crowd is already going and telling them go there. 

Life meant something different then, didn't it? Not just to her. To everyone. A human was a different thing. The world was wider, it was _wilder_ , and the rules were jazz, a frantic improv game of telephone between a community and oblivion lurking with dark eyes and soft fur in the tall grass. There's nothing on the other end, of course, but that's not the point, really. (Jazz is, Booker tells her, about the notes you don't play, after all.)

Joe got really into self-evident truths for awhile. She spent a hundred years or so deeply drunk on Caribbean rum (slave labor! What an era) to keep from digging her claws deep into what _that_ meant, exactly. Thank God they found Booker and he took over being the obviously drunk and morose one, and she looked sage and reasonable by comparison. 

Nicky had told the new one that they fight for what they think is right, and she'd nearly choked on her stew. It's a nice bit of hedging from Nicky. She didn't think he had it in him. 

If Nile had asked for examples, Andy would have had to walk out of the room, and that would have been answer enough, wouldn't it? So they're wrong sometimes, okay? They have blood on their hands, in their skin, sunk in their marrow, in between the whorls of their fingertips, on everything they touch, like ash, like smoke. Not all their choices are the right ones. They roll the dice, they takes their chances, and sometimes it means looking back at a goddamn slaughter and saying, "Well, shit." The problem with a good idea is that people are the ones who execute it and - well, they do execute. 

"Genocide" is a new word, comparatively. It's not a new concept. 

It's not why she started smoking, but. It's a ritual. An acknowledgement. A moment for some peace. An ache deep in the lungs. 

If Nicky and Joe weren't infinitely tangled up in each other they'd be worse off than she and Booker, she's sure of it. They have _heart_. They _care_. They're all of them stuck in this shitty game but Nicky and Joe want to _win_ it. Like it can be won. Like there's any point to any of it at all anymore. 

Andy walked her team into what she thought was a rescue mission of girl-children and instead it was an abattoir, a killing floor, an open grave and there are just five people in the world to whom Andy owed allegiance but she'd betrayed the ones she hadn't already with that decision. That she hadn't known at the time doesn't matter. It didn't keep them from starring in Copley's little snuff film. Joe wakes up gasping sometimes, silent, and won't meet anyone's eyes when he does, and that's on her in the end. Not knowing is never an excuse. 

What they _think_ is right.

The American West Coast is burning, she knows. Nile likes that song about it, the spooky one with the lyric _Who's burning California?_ Nile has terrible taste in music but sometimes it's catchy. The Danube is revealing old stones, ones Andy had forgotten. Up north, ice is cracking. 

Andy would have burned it all then, if she'd wanted to. There's something deeper than muscle memory that twitches in her at the thought of that power, of that devastation, of the scent of bitter smoke on the wind. Her people believed her that powerful and so she was, in a way, and she burned with it. They burned with it, pyre-bright in the mountains. There's a caravan of cars out of Oregon and she does not hate it, really. 

It may not be _right_.

She's mortal now. She thinks of a flame guttering, flaring bright over the wick. 

Nicky walks by while she's scrolling through news on Booker's old laptop. He pauses as the screen shows on tangerine sky over Oregon, headlights low on the horizon. 

"Awful, isn't it?" he says in passing. 

_Awe,_ Andy thinks, _full of_. "Yes," she says, staring at the screen. "It's awful."

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Phoebe Bridgers' "I Know the End"


End file.
